I think the concern is whether it will be on Steam at launch. We all understand it will be on GOG, PSN, and Xbox stores.
I’d be very surprised if it wasn’t, but a lot of the Epic criticism goes away with GOG being DRM-free and whatnot. Not to turn this thread into another Epic slugfest, if you will.
True enough - an easy to use pipeline must make a world of difference on the dev side.
I’m pretty sure Cyberpunk is the reason they are ready to switch to a new engine. That game had (has?) way too many issues…
Regarding the engine being irrelevant, I can’t really agree with that. The Gamebryo engine definitely carried over bugs / weaknesses to each new itteration. Remember the Aurora engine they got from Bioware and crowbard Witcher1 out of it?
The Frostbite limitations for Dragon Age Inquisition was also a big topic of discussion at the time.
So the choice of engine does have a big impact.
Regarding the “new saga”, I’d be curious to leap ahead 100 years and see some new schools developing, perhaps slowly rebuilding Kaer Morhen. I’d rather leave Geralt & Ciris story untouched.
Well, nanite would certainly address the streaming and display issues on PS4/Xbone. The Witcher is more countryside than city and nanite doesn’t work on anything that moves, like swaying trees, foliage, etc.
I know little about the massive world of 3d engines, especially hyper optimizations, but those effects are just shader magic (fairly) independent of engine with little to do with geometry, no?
Interesting thing about that statement is what it said about Cyberpunk. They’ve soft announced the expansion (if they hadn’t already), but I suspect it will be the only one. I can’t imagine they will want to persist with RED engine if they’re transitioning to Unreal as an organisation.
I hope they let us define our character ourselves and do not provide a canned character. Something that lets you find your place in the world and you are not pre-chosen for a destin role.
UE5 Nanite specifically is about streaming geometry from hi-res sources from disk to memory at different LOD with really high efficiency. That is more or less what REDengine was trying to do in Cyberpunk-- and I thought it was pretty damn effective on my high-end PC, but it was more or less a disaster on last-gen consoles. It is easy for me to imagine that CD Projekt saw that the technical edge and development efficiencies of keeping their engine in-house were no longer worth the cost and risks.
Right, but that is more building and terrain geometry (or individually placed trees) than grass and other slight visual variations that don’t really need object interactions calculations every single frame.
I would love this! Let me make my own Witcher!
I do not want to play a Witcher at all. I want to play a mage.
Oh that would be cool too. I have a hard time picturing a game that will let you go either way with it, because it seems like they would have very different story/quest lines.
That said…we’ve got 3 games as a Witcher. Maybe it’s time to let us play a mage, and just let that be the focus!
Would be awesome if they could let you go either way with it, but I have a hard time wrapping my head around how they set the game up like that.
Nobody is going to shift a massive game like Cyberpunk to an entirely new new engine just to publish some DLC. Especially with all the sunk costs they’ve put in to fixing the game up since launch.
Yeah, that cracked me up.
I think one of the best parts of the Witcher series has been that it’s been shaped around a specific character, one that speaks with Doug Cockle’s voice and has the history and worldview of Geralt, and his relationships with all the colorful characters inhabiting their world. I feel that strength outweighs the value of being able to pick out nose shapes and hair color, so I personally would rather have a pre-configured character.
I don’t think that post suggested that at all. Simply that the Cyberpunk expansion might be the only one, as CDPR might not be keen to keep investing effort and time in publishing stuff for a game running on the old engine when they are focusing on the next game on a completely different engine (i.e. time spent further fixing that engine or expanding what it can do in an expansion might not be appealing). Did I misunderstand?
I can see the argument, but I would have thought the main factor would be how the DLC sells. If it does gangbusters, I doubt they’re going to refuse to do more just because it’s on the old engine.
Right, but the implication some people are taking is that if you shift the majority of your company over to a new engine, you may not want to continue working with the old engine even if the DLC “does gangbusters” because it would impact the adoption of the new tools.
It’s not like it couldn’t be separate teams hired and fired as needed, that never happens in such a company!